Chicago cop's story reveals heart of department

Daily Herald: "Violent crime on the rise in Chicago."

ABC 7: "Third Chicago policeman killed since July."

With nerve-rattling news headlines like those, who would ever want to be a Chicago cop?

Why would any man or woman want to put on a police uniform and flak jacket to step onto the streets of Chicago, where there have been 50 more murders so far this year than last including a few cops?

Why not go to New York or Los Angeles where the murder count continues to fall - even below Chicago's total, despite their populations being larger?

The answer to those questions is still sitting in a cell at the North Central prison in Iowa, in between drying-up cornfields, about two hours north of Des Moines.

His name is Mike Mette, pronounced Mett-ee. You may have heard about Mike. He is the 31-year-old Chicago police officer who got into a scrape with a drunk while visiting his brother in Dubuque three years ago.

They were all at a late night party when Mette and his friends decided to leave. On their way out, the host of the house party, Jake Gothard, had a few choice words with Mette and the others. It was just 3 a.m. drunk talk.

Then, according to police, Gothard started chasing Mette down the street, pushing and hitting him. Finally, Mette had enough and slugged Gothard in the kisser.

To serve and protect the public from such future threats, the Dubuque police arrested Mette, the foreigner from Chicago, and charged him with assault.

A Dubuque judge, Monica Ackley, didn't buy Mette's self-defense excuse, even though she said that Mette was not the aggressor. She suggested he should have run away from the drunk, and then sentenced him to five years in prison for not doing so.

Last week, after Mette had been in jail for a year, Iowa Appeals Court justices used better sense and overturned the guilty verdict. The appellate judges didn't say that Judge Monica Ackley had been sipping the white lightning when she found Mette guilty, but they might as well have said so. The higher court decision made her ruling look as foolish as it was.

When Mette gets out of prison, probably sometime this week if the Iowa Attorney General drops any future foolishness against him, he wants to do two things. First, he will have a juicy steak dinner at the home of some family friends not far from the Iowa prison where he's been locked up.

Then, he will return to Chicago to resume being a cop. Maybe not a better one than he was before, but certainly more enlightened. Not many police officers leave the street, serve time with the kind of people they had been locking up, then return to the street to once again enforce the law.

"I hope this wouldn't make me second guess anything. That would put me and my partner at risk," Mette told me in a prison interview last week.

"Like I've told guys here (inmates in prison), it is not so much us (the police) against them. It's my job. When I wear the uniform, that's what I will be doing," said Mette, who now looks like Serpico the movie cop, since replacing his buzz cut with long hair and a full beard.

For his boss, Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis, Mette's impending return was the only spot of good news last week-a week marred by the funeral of a murdered officer.

"If you look at the tragedy we just went through the other day and we lost Nate Taylor; the people here really needed this, it was a great shot in the arm," Weis said of the Mette appeal victory.

"People are excited. You get on the elevator - 'Did you hear the good news? Mike Mette won, Mike Mette won, he's going to be able to come back to us,'" Weis said.

Of course, Weis has his own troubles. He's getting it from all sides. The crime trends are not good. As of Sept. 30, the city had recorded 392 murders, compared to 342 during that period last year. So the superintendent will take whatever good news he can.

Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine, an outspoken supporter of Mette (and who employs Mette's father Bob as an investigator), sees an upside to how the Iowa case played out.

"When something like this happens, it's a little bit of a nudge to us in law enforcement. Let's watch what we're doing out there because things can happen," said Devine. "This is just a little warning sign for all of us, let's be careful with what we do."

When Mike Mette puts back on the police hat with the checkerboard band, he will return to Chicago streets that are a little more dangerous than when he left.

That is precisely why we need him back.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.